Apple hasn’t launched a proper social network since iTunes Ping crashed and burned. But some Apple features nonetheless function like social apps, such as iMessage or the shared albums feature in Photos. The latest such trend, it seems, has made Apple’s ‘Find My’ a key social app for keeping up with close friends and family.
Social sharing features have started becoming commonplace in recent years, especially among younger users. Services like Snapchat and Instagram have offered and tested such capabilities.
But Apple offers its own built-in location sharing feature with the Find My app, and it’s apparently catching on.
Ellen Huet writes for Bloomberg:
I love sharing real-time locations with my friends. Over the last couple years I’ve gradually persuaded about 20 friends to let me track their whereabouts 24/7. And in turn, I give them mine.
We mostly use iOS’s Find My app, plus a few Android-user friends with Google Maps’ location-sharing function. Whenever I want, I can open up the app and gaze affectionately at my collection of little friend-dots on the map, drifting around the city, the country, or sometimes the globe.
[…]
The digital habit has also grown more popular among younger generations. Some in Gen Z see it as a rite of friendship or a milestone indicating closeness.
While there’s no hard data in Huet’s piece about this trend, anecdotally I’ve seen Find My sharing become more of a thing in my circles too.
You can also see Apple’s awareness of this trend in its recent Star Wars ad. The ad’s Mandalorian-inspired tag line goes, “This is the way…to find your friends.”
The benefits of sharing location with Find My
As location tracking becomes more commonly accepted as normal, it makes sense to take that a step further and share your location with close loved ones.
Huet gives examples of how her social sharing has created opportunities for delightful connection. She mentions a time she enjoyed an unplanned meetup with friends in the airport after they spotted her nearby in the app.
There’s also the convenience angle when it comes to planned meetings. No need to wonder how close or far someone is when you can just open the Find My app.
Apple, for its part, has made it easier in recent iOS versions to see and share location info. In the Messages app, for example, current location is now listed under a person’s contact photo. The keyboard will auto-suggest sharing your location in certain scenarios, too.
There are countless privacy angles worth exploring related to this Find My trend, but it’s a fascinating development to explore nonetheless.
Do you use Find My for social location sharing? How does that work for you? Let us know in the comments.
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